No I think you're spot on. It's easy to see the web as an obvious invention with hindsight, but just imagine a world where tcp/ip is the only protocol available

No I think you're spot on. It's easy to see the web as an obvious invention with hindsight, but just imagine a world where tcp/ip is the only protocol available to you. I could easily imagine a world in which someone thought to create an across-the-wire binary specification rather than a really simple text protocol. The genius of http and html is that they are very simple. I remember right after the dot-com bubble crashed a bunch of people basically said the web was dead and that we should be passing binaries back-and-forth. Inventing something simple and useful that the average person can easily pick up is the work of a genius (and yes, the average person can write html, my mom doesn't understand how the internet even works, but she writes html for her job).